The lack of tourism development in Timor-Leste can be situated as an opportunity to build ‘from scratch’ an innovative and sustainable tourism sector that capitalises on the advantages of peripherality, including amenability to peak experiences, tourism centrality, opportunistic innovation, optimal autonomy and cultural/natural distinctiveness. As such, peripherality is positioned as a negotiable and negotiated construct. A resultant spatial framework for strategic development, in tandem with the principles of enlightened mass tourism, features tourism sub-systems with core growth poles, cultural hinterlands with community-responsive tourism and nature-based hinterlands, both terrestrial and marine, that emphasise visitor participation in site enhancement. These initiatives can inform sustainable tourism development in other incipient destinations or be used to recalibrate tourism in more-developed destinations.